Woolly personages

by Donald Brook

If Arthur Wicks had shown the paintings and prints that are now at Wat­ters Gallery two or three years ago, he would by this time have a solid reputation. And like others with a solid reputation founded on the colourfield non-figuration of the late sixties, he would he in difficulties, for the style is already complete in all its essential inventions, and, on or over the brink of prettiness.
He works with most of the devices that energised the Central Street painters, plus a geometric line that he may have got from Europe rather than America  or perhaps from Albers and gives them all a personal delicacy.  It is not original work, but it is nevertheless distinctive.  There is something curious about the colour that has a sort of electric or chemical unnaturalness, totally unrelated to the comfortable earths and the familiar colour-merchant's primaries. As well, his drawing, that is generally not "deductively" related to the edge of the support, has a wryness about it that entertains the eye much as an intelligent conversation engages the mind --- appreciatively, without leaning on sentiment, or charm, and certainly without bombast.

It may be no more than a 'idiosyncrasy that I prefer these paintings very much to those of Frank Hodgkinson at the Rudy Komon Gallery, for which no such analogy could be drawn.      
Frank Hodgkinson has thinned out his paint flattened his pictorial space and abandoned the high drama of black, gold and scarlet, and the sense of engagement with overblown issues fit for a Jacobean Hemingway. There is still talk in the catalogue about `the balance of the corn and the phallus,' but what we are actually shown is more like colourfield painting with the edges gone slack and billowing over each other in ,a sort of fiat funky intimacy, like naughty plastic bags.

Col Jordan,  at Bonython's, is still working patiently with slats and arcs and scalloped cut-outs of acrylic, designed as if at the Bauhaus but coloured by a confectioner. And in his paintings, little flocks of comic-strip cloud in sim­ilar colours frolic across each other, and round a broader design' element like a geometrically knotted tube.
I cannot persuade myself to think of it as other than pleasantly decorative, be­cause it seems to engage with no artistic problems or questions of any serious­ness. One thinks of the legion of ornamental objects in those shops that do not even mean to be art shops, and one wonders whether the differences are really "telling" , between a Jordan construction and the window-furniture of any department store looking for a modern image.

Perhaps the strongest show this week — certainly the most extraordinary — is Mona Hessing's family of tapestries at Bonython's.
At first sight they have the look of bizarre and exotic vestments, that ought to have medieval or eccle­siastical or Tibetan names. One "garment" overlaps another; is caught up, folded, gathered, roped. shaved, fringed and tasselled with richly dyed wools.
But then, the image of a garment gives way to a more organic and vital
metaphor, as if each object were a presence; a sort of flat and shaggy personage, a dress and a creature at the same time.
It may be overdone, and come to seem in a little while like a joke about antimacassars after hormone treatment. But in the middle of a run of generally flat, austerity and intelligent art it has all the warmth and amiability of the comforter that Linus carries around in Peanuts.

 

NEW EXHIBITIONS

Barefoott Art Gallery: paintings by William Aylward
Watters Gallery: paintings and prints by Arthur Wicks. To 15 May
Mosman Gallery: paintings by Doreen Gadsby
Bonython Art Gallery: paintings and constructions by coal Jordan; tapestries by Mona Hessing. To 18 May

 

The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday, 29 April 1979